How Agile Can Accelerate Your Transformation

Every organization is looking for a powerful catalyst. Each executive wants to embrace new opportunities for growth. All teams want to build amazing products. Each team member wants to be empowered. So how do Agile methods play a key part?

Agile is a Dynamic Catalyst

Using an Agile framework such as Scrum can greatly advance your initiative for change. When a cross-functional team adopts Scrum as their learning Agile framework they are forced (kindly) to delivery working value within one month, to be accountable to each other on a daily basis, and to be empowered to make adjustments to their plans and their approach to solving problems. This allows the team to respond quickly to new opportunities.

Responding to Change is Agile

The three inspect and adapt ceremonies of Scrum (Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective) allow for quick analysis and adjustment based on the most recent quantitative and qualitative information. And, if the Scrum team shortens their Sprint length (e.g. From one month to two weeks) their speed to learn and adjust increases dramatically – which can produce stellar results.

Agile Can Equal Amazing Results

Through these feedback loops, cross-functional teams, and a framework that works as a catalyst Scrum can greatly improve your chances for amazing results. Agile values and principles help with the overall concepts and thinking. The next step is to use an Agile framework such as Scrum or Kanban to create a systematic learning environment to deliver amazing results. Connecting the Being and Doing of Agile is what is needed for this dramatic performance to take place, and this needs to be modelled by the coaches and leaders for the transformation. Once modelled, the teams need to be empowered to make changes, learn, and provide greater value in a safe space.

Empower Teams Through Agile Methods

Many organization give lip service to an Agile transformation by doing some training, some coaching, and some mentoring. However, most of them fail to truly empower their teams. Empowerment includes: providing consistent encouragement to build courage in the team members; identifying opportunities for growth with the team(s), allowing the team to take-on and overcome obstacles, and helping the team take action; co-creating the new model for how the teams with interact with each other and other departments; and supporting new changes and ideas that the teams deem worthy to pursue.

Above is a diagram to illustrate how using Agile frameworks, values, tools and techniques can greatly improve an organization’s change journey. The choice to make it happen is yours. One large piece of this is to remove obstacles at the team level and at the organizational level.

By using Agile as a catalyst, to make critical changes quickly, by doing and being Agile, and by empowering teams, the organization can greatly improve and speed up their transformation with better results, improved quality, and more satisfied customers.

How have you used Agile to dramatically improve your results? What did empowerment of teams look like in your organization?